The Prevailing Mood

I can’t find the Heidegger phrase, that ‘anxiety is the prevailing mood’ or something like it, which not finding it makes me anxious knowing it exists, or something very close to it exists, as a phrase attributed to Heidegger in the novel I’m reading at the moment written by David Markson titled Wittgenstein’s Mistress, hoping I haven’t misquoted either the author or Heidegger himself.

I’ve just spent the better part of 45 minutes searching for the Heidegger attribution which I know exists having read it in Markson’s book somewhere but not now able to find it, knowing W.H. Auden once identified the age of anxiety as The Age of Anxiety, or did he? Yes he did, the book is titled “The Age of Anxiety” and is a long poem in six parts which I’ve never read from start to finish but remember that some of the setting for the poem was a bar in New York City, and I seem to remember the bar was located on 7th Avenue, though I might be mistaken.

Yes, I’m tempted to keep searching for the actual Heidegger phrase though the clock is ticking and I’ve become aware that it’s possible I haven’t read the phrase Markson attributes to Heidegger, that it’s not actually in the book Markson wrote and is instead in my imagination, sort of this inexplicable amalgamation of informational stray cats and dogs I adopt along the way when I’m reading to claim as my own, creating my own informational highway paved with truths and fictions. And so I turn page after page, searching for the phrase attributed to Heidegger, finding it’s actually fun searching for it but not finding it, turning page after page in search, almost reading the book all over again, getting to know better many of the characters—among them Van Gogh, Joan Baez, Homer, George Washington, Magritte, Pascal, John Ruskin, Brahms, Robert Rauschenberg, Leonardo—to name just a few.

Then finally I find the phrase attributed to Martin Heidegger the philosopher, not near the beginning of the book at all but very near the end, “about inconsequential perplexities now becoming the fundamental mood of existence.” Oddly enough, the phrase is comforting to me.